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Irdeto

Irdeto’s head office in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area is a sustainable building in a business park in Hoofddorp. Read on to find out why they chose Amsterdam.

Headquarters in Amsterdam

Graham Kill, Irdeto’s CEO, and Christopher Schouten, its senior director of solution marketing, explain that the Amsterdam office will oversee all the company’s activities in the Western hemisphere. Meanwhile, Irdeto has a second head office in Beijing. Pay-TV and privileged content access systems have traditionally been its core business, and in Asia this market is still growing. But in the West, the market is changing, and so is Irdeto.

“Clearly, we need to move up the chain,” says Kill. “So we have also been positioning ourselves as a supplier of Media 3.0 solutions. With broadband networks growing, we are seeing a rise in demand for technological solutions that allow broadband providers to use multiple platforms. How do you offer consumers access to large data packages via their television sets, tablet PCs or mobile phones? We have developed a standard solution that makes it all possible.”

Shaping the new

“Here in Hoofddorp, we’re helping to shape the new Irdeto,” continues Kill. “We’ve always been an innovative company at heart, but it’s still a great challenge to develop new products and services more quickly and reduce our time to market. “We will be analysing future trends in the average user’s content consumption patterns,” says Christopher Schouten. “We’ll assess how Irdeto can keep offering added value to its clients – mainly telecom companies, cable companies and pay-TV providers.”

He is enthusiastic about progress so far. “It’s remarkable to see how effortlessly we’ve integrated so many measures and changes,” he says. “It’s even more remarkable when you consider that we’re basically a sort of mini UN; I’d say a good two-thirds of our workforce are from other countries, with some forty different nationalities working together under the same roof.” Schouten is himself from the USA, and Kill from the UK.

Airport advantage

“Still, that melting-pot culture has seemed to flourish under these circumstances,” Schouten concludes. ”The fact that we’re located in the Netherlands neutralises any potential contradictions. We speak English at the office, and no one has any problems accepting that. For many of our colleagues, the work/life balance this country has to offer is much more attractive than what they have experienced elsewhere. And this office is just a stone’s throw from the best airport in Europe. Even if you need to go to China, you can still choose between several flights a day. Together, all these advantages contributed to our decision to invest heavily in expanding and prolonging our presence here.”

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